SGI ICE

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ICE supercomputers are cluster systems for massively parallel computing by the American computer manufacturer Silicon Graphics . After SGI was sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( HPE ), these systems were renamed HPE SGI 8600. The TOP500 list from July 2017 includes 22 ICE installations alone. The systems run under Linux operating systems.

The ICE series is based on standard components such as the Intel Xeon CPUs, standard DDR4 working memory and InfiniBand networking components.

The basic component consists of a double 42- height units - Rack in which 2 * 4 - 10 height units high mating housing, "Enclosures" called the 9 processing units and network switches to record. Such a double rack is called an "E-cell" . There is an integrated cooling unit between the two racks. The computers are cooled by cold air; the thermal energy is transferred to a water heat exchanger which is also integrated.

The networking of the individual computers ("nodes") takes place with the help of the Infiniband technology, which enables direct access to the main memory of remote computers (one speaks here of "shared memory" systems), the network itself can be interconnected in different topologies , to keep latencies low and to maximize data throughput.

Different options are available for both the computer plug-in units and the networking technology:

  • Blades:
    • 4 x 1 socket Intel Xeon Phi blades, called "Kendall" - XA760i, 288 CPUs per E-cell with up to 18,432 cores
    • 4 x 2-socket Xeon Scalable Processor - Blades, called "Saxon" - XA730i, 576 CPUs and up to 16128 cores per E-cell. Older versions with Xeon Haswell, Broadwell processors were already available in the past
    • a combined GPU / CPU blade with 1 x 2 socket Xeon Scalable Processor and 2 or 4 Nvidia Tesla P100 on SXM2 board, called "Plainfield" - XA780i, 144 CPUs and up to 288 GPUs per E-cell
  • Infiniband networking:
    • Infiniband FDR cards and switches with a bandwidth of 50 Gbit / s and port
    • Infiniband EDR cards and switches with a bandwidth of 100 Gbit / s and port
    • Intel Omni-Path cards and switches with a bandwidth of 100 Gbit / s and port

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.top500.org/list/2017/06/
  2. ↑ https://www.hpe.com/us/en/pdfViewer.html?resource=/content/hpe/country/us/en/resources/servers/data-sheet/hpe-sgi-8600-quick-specs

Web links